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The exploitation of Mongolia

Saturday at conference in Liverpool is a relative day off for me, at least compared with yesterday.

In a way I went back to my roots today (I used to be national campaigns co-ordinator before being Principal Speaker), chairing two fringe meetings about issues-based campaigns.

The first was planning and brainstorming for how we can promote and grow the Census Alert campaign to stop the UK census in 2011 from being run by arms company Lockheed Martin.

Greens campaigning locally can make a real difference here, because local councils depend on the data from the census for their funding, and also have to work closely with the chosen contractor to help ensure compliance in the kind of ‘hard to reach groups’ we think will be most put off by giving the contract to Lockheed.

Because the campaign is cross party, even Green parties without councillors can help by getting councillors from other parties to object to this involvement. There were lots of other ideas at the meeting of course, but I won’t mention them here – out of studying-Lockheed-induced paranoia.

After that, I showed a film by the International Chair of the Mongolian Green Party, Purevsuren Shah, given to me when he visited London earlier this summer.

An accomplished journalist and broadcaster, he directed the film himself to draw attention to the huge problems being caused by rampant gold and copper mining across Mongolia.

With only half a translation of the Mongolian language dialogue, plus my notes from being talked through the film, I had to put together subtitles myself. They got a bit sparse and comical in places, but the presentation got across the gist of the problem, which is anything but amusing.

The problem is that Mongolia has some of the best and largest gold and copper deposits in the world and since 1997, with a massive acceleration since 2000, the government has been selling licences to mine these at a huge rate. The area of Mongolia covered by mining licences is now about 45%, and they are going for a relative song - $20 a hectare for a 30-year license is typical.

One ‘stock watch’ website I consulted just before conference said that Mongolia is literally a gold mine for investors because of, "the incredible ease and speed of securing exploration and mining licenses." There are literally hundreds of mining companies involved in this new gold rush, but most of the biggest offenders are based in Canada, Australia, South Africa and London.

Not all of these licenses have been exploited yet, but those that have are causing immense problems already – literally carving chunks out of Mongolia’s beautiful landscapes and leaving a legacy of pollution that will be there for years to come. More than 2,000 of the country’s small and medium sized rivers have disappeared, due to mining operations digging up their sources, and there is widespread soil and water pollution from the mercury and cyanide used in the mining and extraction process.

Only 20% of the land used for mining is rehabilitated afterwards, and the film is full of images of gorgeous hills and valleys being turned into dried up, uninhabitable rubble.

The environmental problems will become bigger and more irreversible if something isn’t done soon, so Perevsuren Shah is aiming to draw international attention to the issue in order to increase pressure on the irresponsible mining companies and the irresponsible government that is encouraging the destruction.

He also wants help to bring environmental scientists and investigators to Mongolia measure properly the pollution and damage caused so far. He is a soil scientist himself, and much of the research shown in the film is his own, but it’s too big a job for one team and they badly need more investment in their projects.

We talked about how the Greens in the UK can help and plan to make contact with other green groups to help get this onto the agenda here. One obvious task is to sort out a full translation of the film, so anyone out there with skills in both Mongolian and English, please get in touch.

Oh, and finally, there’s an awful lot of talk here about the upcoming referendum on whether to have an actual Leader and Deputy (or Co-Leaders) instead of the two Principal Speakers we now have as our main representatives. But the main debate on that is on Sunday, so I’ll save that for later.

Sian Berry lives in Kentish Town and was previously a principal speaker and campaigns co-ordinator for the Green Party. She was also their London mayoral candidate in 2008. She works as a writer and is a founder of the Alliance Against Urban 4x4s

Hannan Fodder: This week, Daniel Hannan gets his excuses in early

Since Daniel Hannan, a formerly obscure MEP, has emerged as the anointed intellectual of the Brexit elite, The Staggers is charting his ascendancy...

When I started this column, there were some nay-sayers talking Britain down by doubting that I was seriously going to write about Daniel Hannan every week. Surely no one could be that obsessed with the activities of one obscure MEP? And surely no politician could say enough ludicrous things to be worthy of such an obsession?

They were wrong, on both counts. Daniel and I are as one on this: Leave and Remain, working hand in glove to deliver on our shared national mission. There’s a lesson there for my fellow Remoaners, I’m sure.

Anyway. It’s week three, and just as I was worrying what I might write this week, Dan has ridden to the rescue by writing not one but two columns making the same argument – using, indeed, many of the exact same phrases (“not a club, but a protection racket”). Like all the most effective political campaigns, Dan has a message of the week.

First up, on Monday, there was this headline, in the conservative American journal, the Washington Examiner:

“We will get a good deal – because rational self-interest will overcome the Eurocrats’ fury”

The message of the two columns is straightforward: cooler heads will prevail. Britain wants an amicable separation. The EU needs Britain’s military strength and budget contributions, and both sides want to keep the single market intact.

The Con Home piece makes the further argument that it’s only the Eurocrats who want to be hardline about this. National governments – who have to answer to actual electorates – will be more willing to negotiate.

And so, for all the bluster now, Theresa May and Donald Tusk will be skipping through a meadow, arm in arm, before the year is out.

Before we go any further, I have a confession: I found myself nodding along with some of this. Yes, of course it’s in nobody’s interests to create unnecessary enmity between Britain and the continent. Of course no one will want to crash the economy. Of course.

I’ve been told by friends on the centre-right that Hannan has a compelling, faintly hypnotic quality when he speaks and, in retrospect, this brief moment of finding myself half-agreeing with him scares the living shit out of me. So from this point on, I’d like everyone to keep an eye on me in case I start going weird, and to give me a sharp whack round the back of the head if you ever catch me starting a tweet with the word, “Friends-”.

Anyway. Shortly after reading things, reality began to dawn for me in a way it apparently hasn’t for Daniel Hannan, and I began cataloguing the ways in which his argument is stupid.

Problem number one: Remarkably for a man who’s been in the European Parliament for nearly two decades, he’s misunderstood the EU. He notes that “deeper integration can be more like a religious dogma than a political creed”, but entirely misses the reason for this. For many Europeans, especially those from countries which didn’t have as much fun in the Second World War as Britain did, the EU, for all its myriad flaws, is something to which they feel an emotional attachment: not their country, but not something entirely separate from it either.

Consequently, it’s neither a club, nor a “protection racket”: it’s more akin to a family. A rational and sensible Brexit will be difficult for the exact same reasons that so few divorcing couples rationally agree not to bother wasting money on lawyers: because the very act of leaving feels like a betrayal.

Problem number two: even if everyone was to negotiate purely in terms of rational interest, our interests are not the same. The over-riding goal of German policy for decades has been to hold the EU together, even if that creates other problems. (Exhibit A: Greece.) So there’s at least a chance that the German leadership will genuinely see deterring more departures as more important than mutual prosperity or a good relationship with Britain.

And France, whose presidential candidates are lining up to give Britain a kicking, is mysteriously not mentioned anywhere in either of Daniel’s columns, presumably because doing so would undermine his argument.

So – the list of priorities Hannan describes may look rational from a British perspective. Unfortunately, though, the people on the other side of the negotiating table won’t have a British perspective.

Problem number three is this line from the Con Home piece:

“Might it truly be more interested in deterring states from leaving than in promoting the welfare of its peoples? If so, there surely can be no further doubt that we were right to opt out.”

I could go on, about how there’s no reason to think that Daniel’s relatively gentle vision of Brexit is shared by Nigel Farage, UKIP, or a significant number of those who voted Leave. Or about the polls which show that, far from the EU’s response to the referendum pushing more European nations towards the door, support for the union has actually spiked since the referendum – that Britain has become not a beacon of hope but a cautionary tale.

But I’m running out of words, and there’ll be other chances to explore such things. So instead I’m going to end on this:

Hannan’s argument – that only an irrational Europe would not deliver a good Brexit – is remarkably, parodically self-serving. It allows him to believe that, if Brexit goes horribly wrong, well, it must all be the fault of those inflexible Eurocrats, mustn’t it? It can’t possibly be because Brexit was a bad idea in the first place, or because liberal Leavers used nasty, populist ones to achieve their goals.

Read today, there are elements of Hannan’s columns that are compelling, even persuasive. From the perspective of 2020, I fear, they might simply read like one long explanation of why nothing that has happened since will have been his fault.

Jonn Elledge is the editor of the New Statesman's sister site CityMetric. He is on Twitter, far too much, as @JonnElledge.